Lightweight and Compromise-Resilient Message Authentication in Sensor Networks

While a number of authentication ideas are proposed by developers regularly, this paper looks at a fresh approach to authentications. The paper proposes a new message authentication approach in a bid to understand the limitations faced by existing authentication schemes. This approach is unique because it is lightweight in terms of computation. This approach offers communication and storage overhead and should be able to withstand a variety of sensor node compromises. It provides immediate authentication along with scalability options. This paper particularly delves on the issue of authentication that arises with protection for communication authenticity and integrity of wireless sensor networks. There are a number of limitations faced by existing authentication approaches. For instance, high computation or communication overhead, they are unable to secure against a number of node compromises, provide delayed authentication, inability to provide scalability. The novel approach of authentication picked up in this paper looks at a perturbed polynomial-based technique to avoid problems that exist with the current authentication approaches. The issue of sensor nodes arrived when a sensor network is deployed in an unattended or hostile environment. In such a case the adversary may capture or reprogram sensor nodes. This can lead to various attacks from inside the network itself. Often, message authenticity and integrity are also attacked, especially if the sender and the receiver are not within the transmission range of each other.